As I prepare to leave Las Vegas, I want to wrap up our MAKE at CES 2013 coverage. Since Tuesday, I’ve spent a lot of time scouring the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center or packed elbow-to-elbow in the press room in an attempt to deliver stories with a maker’s slant. Going into this, I knew it would be a challenge at a show rooted in the consumer electronics industry. It’s so easy to get drawn in by the glitzy booths built by the big guys or even to find yourself lost among aisles and aisles of iPhone accessories while searching for a diamond in the rough.

One highlight for me was spotting Templeman Automation’s Playsurface, an open-sourced, crowd-funded touch table that we’ve posted about on MAKE before. I was lucky to get a hands on demo of the table and even get a peek inside the cabinet to see how it all works. This was one of those things that looked like it could have been taken right from a booth at Maker Faire, plopped down on the CES show floor and you wouldn’t even know it. Playsurface fit in perfectly in the Eureka Park section of CES, where the show organizers grouped companies that are trying to get a foothold in the consumer electronics industry.

I hope you’ve enjoyed MAKE’s take on CES over the past few days. It was exciting to envelop myself in all the latest technology and I hope I’ve conveyed some of that excitement to you along the way. As usual, we’ll be keeping tabs on all these companies throughout the year and we hope to see even more maker-friendly technology at CES in 2014.

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.